I am a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. I am the director of Diversity Limited, a business that is a vehicle for my work in investment, advice and consultancy. Diversity has holdings in manufacturing, property and technology companies and undertakes advisory work. For my complete disclosure statement, click here. I have a background across various industries, owning businesses in the manufacturing, property and technology sectors and make my day to day living consulting to technology vendors and customers. I cover the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. My areas of interest extend to aviation technology, enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Verizon Reinvents Its Cloud - Pushes VMware Compatability

As the world moves away from telecommunications company’s usual (and highly lucrative) revenue streams. Those telcos are searching for ways to replace all those dollars not going to plain old telephone lines. If you’re a big telco with an existing customer base of businesses, it makes total sense to sell additional services to those customers. What better way to do so than providing them with cloud infrastructure which, after all, is kind of analogous to the phone lines and tolls they’re used to hocking off.

Verizon isn’t a big name in cloud infrastructure, it acquired provider Terremark a couple of years ago and delivers the Terremark cloud services from a dozen or so data centers across the globe. Not satisfied with the penetration that Terremark was gaining however, and worried of Amazon Web Services and Google'sGoogle's moves into its usual Government market, Verizon today announced it’s new “Verizon Cloud”, a product that has been built from the ground up.

Initially the service will be fairly basic (and least compared to the plethora of additional services that GoogleGoogle, AWS and Azure offer on top of storage and compute). The Verizon Cloud will offer object and block storage alongside a compute service. Interestingly, and in a tip of the hat to disruptors such as ProfitBricks, Verizon will be offering customers far greater control of memory size, storage and network parameters on the instances it uses that the competitors do. In something of a backwards step however, the service will be sold only in one hour increments as opposed to finer grained timescales.

In a move that will make the OpenStack ecosystem uncomfortable, Verizon is not relying on the open source initiative for any of its technology, although it will maintain API compatibility with OpenStack (or at least with some of the many flavors of OpenStack that seem to be proliferating). Exactly what Verizon has used to build its cloud remains a little bit of a mystery, it seems to be based on CloudStack, Citrix’ own open source cloud stack, and uses the Xen hypervisor. Verizon isn’t saying exactly what the product is based on, but is promising full compatibility with OpenStack, CloudStack and AWS.

While Verizon made some comments about the lack of robustness or suitability for global scale clouds with OpenStack, the fact that Verizon and Citrix have a long standing relationship would seem as much of the reason for the technology choice as actual capability.

Verizon is strongly targeting enterprises that have existing workloads running on VMwareVMware stacks. In an interview with GigaOm, Verizon promised that

If you now use VMware in the enterprise and want to move workloads or use the same golden image and tools and drivers … you can’t quite do that in Amazon which dictates the kernels and drivers you use. We enhanced the hypervisor to support VMware drivers and toolsets

This would have been even more exciting had it not come awhile after the announcement of general availability of VMware’s own vCloud Hybrid Service, a public cloud offering that is also promising enterprises portability between their existing VMware infrastructure and the new public cloud. If VMware can build some reasonable scale in terms of partners offering vCHS, then Verizon has a hard road to travel in convincing enterprises to sign up – they’re unlikely to have anywhere near the cost advantages that AWS can offer, and enterprises are likely to be less relaxed about a third party service that offers “VMware compatibility” and one which is baked on top of VMware from the get go.

While the Verizon announcement is undeniably interesting, I can’t imagine anyone inside AWS, Google, MicrosoftMicrosoft or VMware are losing too much sleep tonight about it.

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. Read more about Ben here.

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